A Demon’s Escape (Based on a True Story)
Editor’s note: A Demon’s Escape is a fascinating psychological portrait of possession, given in the first person by an unnamed narrator. Is the narrator plagued by a demon, or is it a schizoid mental illness? The story perfectly illustrates this blurred line, and the psychological struggle between good and evil common to Western religion.
The following is the first chapter of the full novella. Please click on the link below to view the full e-book version.
— Brigid Burke
Chapter 1
Now I want the water
To wash away all my sins
The wind to blow away
My thoughts without meaning
The fire to burn
Away my thickened skin
— Dance of Fate, Epica
I had always been the type of being to face things on my own. Visions of sugarplums dancing in my head. You should have a thicker skin than that, I heard them all say at one point. Not that I needed a thick skin to imagine freely.
Just that my imagination, more often than not, resulted in emotional entanglements that I could not face on my own.
I needed the aid of an angel or devil to pull me out of it all.
And that was my very problem.
You can force yourself upon me, but you never will.
— The Last Crusade, Epica
And the fact of the matter was that I no longer knew if I was ‘more angelic’ or ‘more devilish.’ If I had more of Satan or God inside of me.
I knew what I wanted, I was sure of that. But it wasn’t always easy to articulate it to others when I had no idea who I really was or what that really looked like.
It didn’t matter what anyone else thought. All that mattered to me was that I was alive and well, that my heart was beating freely. Whether I chose to feel my emotions fully, or experience the depth of them — that wasn’t up to me. That was up to God, or Satan, or whatever it was that controlled me.
The hell if I knew.
